I just tried today to search for information on how to pay a certain well-known company through a certain well-known bank. Page after page of spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans and spam. I must have tried 10 different searches with various synonyms, phrases and exclusions, and all it did was slightly change the order and keyword relevance of the spam.
The worst part is that the results from all of these sites are identical. It would be nice if Google had at least a modicum of intelligence to say, "Hey, if Mr. User here isn't interested in result #1, he's probably not going to be interested in all of these identical copies of it down below."
Three years ago it used to be that the content I was looking for often didn't exist at all or wasn't indexed, and I was okay with irrelevant results. I'd gladly settle for only a 50% chance of getting the results I wanted as a replacement for the ocean of obvious, pathetic spam I seem to get 90% of the time now.
Here's a thought, Google: How about tossing all of these garbage copypasta spam sites into a "mirrors" link for the original result? Surely you can figure out which site is actually the original; you invented PageRank, so checking a few indexing dates should be practically a "hello world" level of difficulty.

Let's look at where stackoverflow.com traffic came from for the year of 2010. When 88.2% of all traffic for your website comes from a single source, criticizing that single source feels … risky. And perhaps a bit churlish, like looking a gift horse in the mouth, or saying something derogato...